August 3, 2014

JAMES BOND: THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

When
I’m on the motorway and the traffic gets a bit hairy, I pull a Roger Moore
squint.

It’s
for no-one else’s benefit, and I only do it when I check the wing mirror - even
though I can’t see my face.

I
glance to the side, set my jaw… and squint.

This
is a primping technique, essentially – a silly psychological tic employed to
give me a little bit more confidence.

It’s
on the same wavelength as some sub-Partridge saddo, putting on a tuxedo in his
hotel room ahead of a corporate do, striding along the length of a mirror,
turning on his heel, and –

James Bond: The
Spy Who Loved Me is a novelisation of the 1977 Bond movie – and
certainly not the “original canon” novel by Ian Fleming, a total oddity which
would take a Booksquawk post of its own to explain.

The
movie is Sir Roger Moore’s best outing as 007 and arguably the high point of
the entire series. It’s the one with Jaws, the metal-mouthed henchman; the
undersea base that swallows submarines; the shark chute; the amphibious Lotus
Esprit; and the disco ski chase culminating in the union flag parachute base-jump
– the greatest stunt ever filmed.

Then
there’s the sublime theme song, Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better” (can we ever
be sure of her sincerity?), and perhaps the two greatest Bond girls in Barbara
Bach and Caroline Munro (though my heart still aches for Carole Bouquet in For Your Eyes Only).

Nearly
40 years on, despite some incredible advances in special effects which were
unimaginable back then, few if any of these elements have been topped in the
series. Small wonder The Spy Who Loved Me
is such a favourite of Alan Partridge. It’s hard to take in any way seriously, it’s
deeply flawed - but it’s still kind of awesome.

Alongside
Alan Dean Foster’s take on the original Star
Wars from the same year (though George Lucas still gets the credit on the
cover), Christopher Wood’s book was one of the first great mass market novelisations
– an entirely new piece of literature that takes a cinema film as its source,
rather than the other way around. This book – adapted from Wood’s own script,
co-written with Richard Maibaum – retains only two elements from Ian Fleming’s
source novel: the title, and a villain whose dentist who was a bit over-zealous
when it came to fillings.

This
project would have represented an open goal for any writer, but Wood makes a
fine achievement of what could have been a simple hack job. The story follows
007 as he investigates the disappearance of a British nuclear submarine. He is joined
on his mission by Major Anya Amasova, a Russian agent who is also on the trail
of a similarly-misplaced Soviet sub.

There’s
a bit of added tension in this Iron Curtain-spreading relationship after it
emerges that Bond killed Amasova’s lover, right before his base-jump heroics in
the knockout opening scene. Amasova swears revenge, once their mission is over.
But if there’s one man who can charm his way out of that predicament, it’s
Bond.

The
pair link the missing submarines to Sigmund Stroemberg, a megalomaniac industrialist
with an underwater base and some pretty left-field civic planning ambitions.
Lunging at this odd couple from the shadows is Stroemberg’s button man, Jaws, whose
teeth have been replaced with metal fangs, which he puts to gruesome use.

The
globe-trotting adventure takes Bond and Amasova to Egypt and Italy, before a
final showdown at Stroemberg’s hi-tech Atlantean base.

Wood
didn’t have to do so, but he makes a valiant effort at linking this Bond to Ian
Fleming’s original creation. Although Sir Roger Moore will always be synonymous
with the title, I read Wood’s rendering of the character as more like Fleming’s
007 – a curiously humourless thrill-seeker with very expensive tastes. The shift
in tone is striking; many of Bond’s one-liners from the film - such as “Egyptian
builders!”, “What a helpful chap!” and “How does that grab you?” - are not to
be found here.

There
are also references to previous Bond adventures, with nods to his “treasure” of
a Scottish housekeeper, the evil spy network SMERSH and the death of 007’s wife
at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service. Indeed, Bond is attracted to Amasova chiefly because her figure
and demeanour reminds him of Tracy. This seems to imply that Bond has a definitive
preference in types of women, which I didn’t buy. He may have been a bit
one-dimensional when it came to cocktails, but with women, Bond liked to work
his way around the menu. However, having Bond’s heartstrings tugged at the
memory of his wife was a nice link between the past and the present.

Take
some advice, though, James: do not
mention this to her.

Wood
is fully immersed in Fleming’s milieu and writing style. He takes great care to
describe Bond’s tailoring, as well as the food and drink he consumes on his
travels. All that’s missing is a high-stakes gambling duel with his nemesis to
complete the job.

Our
author’s career is a fascinating one. Before hitting the jackpot with Bond,
Christopher Wood already had a successful, if curious CV under the pen-name of
Timothy Lea with his comic-erotica Confessions
books - later made famous on the big screen by seventies jackanapes Robin Askwith.

Wood
also wrote the similarly-naughty Rosie
Dixon: Night Nurse, as well as dabbling in aggro-lit (also extremely
popular during the seventies) with Soccer
Thug, under the pseudonym Frank Clegg.

Christ
only knows how he got from there to writing Bond. There’s hope for us all.

One
scene in particular might have been excised from one of Wood’s Confessions novels: the part where Major
Amasova rubs suntan oil into her lovingly-described breasts, before chiding
herself for indulging in bourgeois luxuries like sunbathing and bikinis and pledging
to read some Engels as penance.

This
passage conjured a brief image of Robin Askwith in a tuxedo, falling off a
ladder outside her window. It could only have been written by a man - and a man
in the mid-1970s, at that.

Wood
is no hack, though. The book’s tone is different to the movie; there are a few
laughs in The Spy Who Loved Me, and
even its silliest concoctions are imbibed in deadly earnest.

Beartrap-mouthed
Jaws is given a detailed backstory as well as a plausible explanation of how he
came to receive his defining dental characteristic. When Bond tangles with this
foe in the film, there’s an element of slapstick; here, it’s played straight,
even when Jaws tries to bite his way into a van Bond is driving.

The
villain, Stroemberg, also benefits from a textured, if disturbing history that
places him in the same bracket as Fleming’s classic rogues’ gallery. He ticks
all the boxes: sexually odd, megalomaniacal, psychotic, and with a curious
deformity (in this case, webbed fingers).

Much
like Fleming, Wood packs in a lot of prima
facie low-rent content, but writes it beautifully. There were some phrases
that leapt off the page. In a grisly scene where a treacherous secretary is served
up to a hungry shark, Wood describes an “obscene candy floss of blood” erupting
from her severed leg. A lift which Bond takes in a hotel “stops to collect
itself like an old lady preparing to cross a road”. After killing a couple of
henchmen, Bond wonders how long it will take for “armies of homeless vermin” to
stream from their bodies in the hot Egyptian climate. And in pondering a
possible sexual conquest, Bond ruminates on whether “the mind of the puritan”
is more lubricious than that of the libertine – a canny nod, perhaps, to
vicarious thrill-seekers getting their jollies second-hand from cinema screens
or 200-page paperbacks.

The
Lotus Esprit submarine convertible is given a lot more to do in this version, dodging
a motorcycle sidecar which turns into a missile. It’s also called into more action
beneath the waves than you see on screen - scripted activity almost certainly
cut for budgetary reasons.

Also
excised from the final draft of the screenplay is a torture scene in which James
Junior is imperilled. This is of a piece with the corporal punishment 007
endures in Casino Royale - except
that this time, instead of being clobbered with a carpet-beater, 003-and-a-half
literally gets a short, sharp shock via some delicately-placed electrodes.

Moonraker?
Legcrosser, more like.

It’s
a quick read, ideal for the beach, and a nostalgia trip for people over a
certain age. I’d be interested to know what today’s twenty-something men think
of this novel (and its source) in comparison to modern-day spy stories, where
technology is as much a driver of the plot as deception. What do they make of
this jovial, suave Bond; would they ever in a million years model themselves on
dear old Sir Roger? An undoubtedly handsome man, but he looked old enough to be
your dad even then.

This
amounts to blasphemy coming from a Scot, but Sir Roger is my favourite Bond. It
helps that he was in the job when I was a boy. Like your favourite Doctor Who,
there’s an imprinting mechanism at work when it comes to “your” Bond. You
follow him like a newly-hatched duckling.

For
me, Bond was never better than when he was played tongue-in-cheek. Moore never
intended anyone to take James Bond seriously – he understood better than anyone
before or since that the role is simple escapism and male fantasy, no more
reflective of real espionage or geopolitical tensions than Sherlock Holmes is
of detective work.

The Spy Who
Loved Me,
and Moore’s Bond, has a distinctly British quality peculiar to that era, which
I noted after the sad passing of Professionals
star Lewis Collins last year.

I
call it rugged naffness. It’s hard to think of an American leading man of this
time who could possibly have played Bond the same way.

You
don’t really buy Moore as a tough guy, although I can picture him as a
50-year-old lothario, the apple of many a yacht club trophy wife’s eye, immaculate
in his navy blue jacket and gold slacks. He’s the sort of charming bugger who
might make a Russian oligarch or dot-com billionaire just that wee bit
insecure.

And
yet, there’s a certain something in his portrayal of Bond that an untutored
part of the male psyche might seek to emulate, no matter how silly. Not a thug,
but wins fights; has his pick of the women; carries a subtle, but distinct,
stench of money.

Nowadays,
looking the part isn’t just a matter of dressing expensively, or staying in
just enough shape to blag it from a certain camera angle (forgive me, Sir Rog,
but you don’t half wear a lot of black in these films).

Now,
leading men have to thrash themselves into almost grotesque shape through laser-guided
gym regimes and dietary interventions that would rival those endured by Olympic
athletes. Young men are following this trend. I’d guess younger fellows would
probably be sceptical about 007’s eating, drinking and smoking habits in this
book – a sure way of killing your athletic prowess and swaddling those abs,
lats, pecs n’ biceps in fat.

I’ve
heard very few straight ladies or gay gentlemen complain about this sort of body
sculpting extremism with regards to Daniel Craig – indeed, they suffer
themselves near silence when he emerges from the sea in Casino Royale - but I find it curious to note the mutation of what
leading men must look like in today’s entertainment world. Will we see Bond
with tattoos, soon? Will he put away the old-fashioned pommel brush and razor
blades shaving kit and let the stubble come in? Will he swap the midnight blue Saville
Row suits for a pair of low-slung, ironically-worn Chinos, or whatever the hell
it is hipsters wear now?

That
British side-parting-cum-comb-over has already gone, thank goodness.

Perhaps
the objectification of Daniel Craig’s body is some form of recompense for all
the blatant, brutal sexism in these stories. There’s still a lot of it about. It’s
curious to note that although Amasova ends up having to be rescued by 007,
she’s still better than just about any Bond girl who followed her. I bought her
as a capable, flint-hearted spy much more than I did Halle Berry’s Jinx, 25
years later.

James Bond: The
Spy Who Loved Me allows us a fresh look at a piece of art familiar from
screenings at Christmas or, latterly, on ITV2 seemingly every second Sunday.
It’s also a fine homage to the style of 007’s creator.

A
host of suitors have taken a stab at James Bond in the past couple of decades,
the famous and unknown alike. But I should be surprised if anyone does it
better than Christopher Wood.